Beck on Methodological Individualism

One of the reasons I favor the Austrian school is the rigor of the conceptual framework on which it is founded. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to convey these concepts to the lay person as anyone who has read the first 200 pages of Human Action and found themselves scratching their head and wondering, "Pardon me, but what is this stuff?" can attest to. In a real world demonstration of these core ideas, Billy Beck of Two-Four gracefully ties together love of rare guitars and classic airplanes to show the very individual nature of value, and what consequences this has for ethics - something Mises did not write about, but extends logically from his ideas. Without the formulation of value as subjective to the individual, something that much of macroeconomics disregards in its collective models, not only does economics lose its basic foundation, but it also leads to a corruption of ethics into reverence for collectivist political systems like democracy. Go read the entire post.

The board investigating the Columbia disaster has issued its final report. Turns out the stuff that did the damage was good old-fashoned freon-contaning ozone-depleting foam, stuff called BX-250 (page 51). The EPA had nothing to do with it.